Did Not Appreciate Music Appreciation Class
January 26th, 2010 Teresa Strasser
All these ear parts hurt. All of them.
Five minutes into Baby Music Appreciation class, I am huddled in the corner trying to nurse my frazzled baby as parents waltz their children around the room so that they can feel the rhythm. Slow, fast, fast, slow, fast, fast, slow, fast, fast, sings the teacher, which also describes the tempo of my meltdown.
We go around the room with a chant welcoming each baby by name.
“We clap for Chloe, hello Chloe, we snap for Olive, hello Olive, we bounce for Jake, hello Jake, we emotionally shut down for Teresa, hello, Teresa.” Goodbye sense of peace. This welcome thing goes on forever. By the end of it, my head is tucked into my husband’s shoulder as he holds Buster in his lap.
The other parents seem to be exploding with euphoria, psyched to be slow, fast, fast, slow, fast, fast dancing and bonding on a Sunday morning, and this makes me feel insane, because I’m not just emotionally miserable, I am experiencing a full-on body cramping, head in a vice, eyeballs aching kinesthetic undoing. Several parents come up to us and say, “Claire hated this the first time, too. She nursed the entire class. Now she loves it!”
They say it’s for newborns to 18 month-olds, but I’m starting to wonder if a four month old baby like Buster really needs music appreciation. It’s hard for me to philosophize, because I’m sweating and blinking excessively. The fluorescent lights are too much, as is the clanging of tiny bells and other baby instruments and the intermittent squealing of babies.
Just when Buster is calm, one of these tots lets out a shriek, and he doesn’t know what the fuck.
And I realize that I can’t handle small crowded rooms, or loud noises, or bright lights, never could. My mom took me to Chinese New Year once in San Francisco, where I grew up, and I begged to wait out the whole thing in the car, away from firecrackers and throngs. I still loathe the Fourth of July, with its unpredictable bursts of noise.
The baby is holding up better than I am, but something about the exhaustion and exaltation of new motherhood has made me quicker to dog the things I used to have to pretend to like.
On the way home, I announce that I am never, ever going back there.
Those other parents loved it, their kids seemed okay with it, but I couldn’t hack it. My baby listens to Neil Diamond’s “Hot August Night” every morning in his swing (minus “Sweet Caroline,” because the Mister removed it from the playlist after declaring it f-ed out) and that’s music appreciation enough for now. I am, I said, I quit.
Mommy and me movie? A dark theatre, no forced mingling with other parents as we are ordered to doe-see-doe in parallel lines across the room, that’s just my speed. The breast-feeding moms support group? Didn’t mind that. Anyone who has been a mother for a single day longer than I have has something to teach me, and I’m all ears.
But speaking of ears, mine can’t handle the symphony or horrible songs and baby screams that make up baby music class.
Instead of feeling like a failure, which is my “go to” and always has been, I feel like Julia Roberts in the movie “Runaway Bride.” She doesn’t know what kind of eggs she likes, because she always just orders what her man likes, so she sits down to an egg taste test to find her true self. This is part of a very touching montage. Sorry about using such a lame movie to make a point. I know it ain’t Kurosawa, but I liked it. And I related.
The kind of parent I want to be is the kind that can announce, even in the midst of two-dozen parents with massive loyalty and mad love for baby music class, that I think it sucks. For me, it’s a sweat box of idiocy and overwhelm that Buster doesn’t need and neither do I.
That goes for everything, as I try to sort out what kind of eggs I like. You sleep train, I don’t. That works for you, I think it’s a fad that makes moms feel like powerless losers most of the time. You don’t use a pacifier, I do, cause it works for me and maybe my child will never learn how to soothe himself but I used one when I was a baby, and as my mom says, “You were over it by college, don’t worry.”
You don’t swaddle, I do. You put in your solid ten minutes of tummy time, I cheat the boy out of fully “experiencing” his arms because he loathes it and I’m pretty sure our parents had no idea what the fuck tummy time was and we eventually rolled over and walked, as I walked away from that music class, as I will continue to walk away from things that just don’t make sense for us.
Here’s the music I appreciate: the volume turning up on my own inner voice about how the heck to spend our time. I hate that I just used the phrase “inner voice,” for the record, but how else can I put it? The baby books, the classes, the parenting advice, it can all get loud and bright and cause a girl to panic, and cause a girl to pretend she enjoys crap like waltzing around a packed room with a bunch of strangers and a confused baby in the hopes that he will one day play first violin in the philharmonic. I don’t even know what a philharmonic is, and I don’t care.
Buster has permission to be average.
That’s right. I’m a Jewish mother who doesn’t need her child to be excellent. When that kid flashes me his gummy smile, when he seems content, that’s the beat I can dance to, that’s the way I like my goddamn eggs cooked.
Next time I’m not feeling a baby activity I think I should be doing, here’s how I’m getting out of there. Slow, fast, fast.
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I Said A Lot of Things
December 3rd, 2009 Teresa Strasser
At least I didn't take one of these.
I was full of pronouncements before I had this baby.
While new moms seemed to whine incessantly about not having time to shower, in a triumph of will and excellent planning, I was going to be the impeccably groomed mother of a newborn. I would make time for blow-outs and pedicures and basic hygiene, because I’m vain, own 17 tubes of lip gloss, refuse to wear too-tight Juicy Couture sweat pants and be all sacrifice-y and bland.
Cut to me sitting around in my own filth with breast milk stains on my husband’s giant plaid shirt, spit-up on my jeans and hair so dirty that when I finally went to the salon, the hairdresser asked me, with more genuine curiosity than disdain, “How long has it been since you’ve washed your hair?”
“Maybe four days?” I lied, before playing the new mom card. And there I was, in that second, manifesting the cliché and flying right in the puffy face of my own naïve declaration. On top of which, I had to ask the hairdresser to hurry it up, the sitter was waiting. The sitter was waiting. This is my life now. I’m this person.
It’s not unusual for me to take a hooker shower in front of the bathroom sink with a couple of baby wipes and almost no shame.
Like I said, I made a lot of pronouncements.
I also proclaimed I would never be one of those moms who has entire conversations about my child’s poop. So, last night I Googled “green poop” on my iPhone while nursing and have now had lengthy conversations with several moms about the causes and potential dangers of green poop. (Just so you know, poop is only concerning if it’s white, black or red, according to Babycenter.com.)
Now, I get it, I get the poop talk. As a new mom, I’m just trying to do right by Buster and he is very limited in his modes of communication. At ten weeks old, he has to let his poop do the talking. We have even photographed the green poop, lest our idea of green and our pediatrician’s differ. Mint green? Forest green? Mossy green? Let’s break out or camera and show you the exact hue. On my camera, there is more than one picture of my child’s poop. This is my life now. I’m this person.
To anyone who would listen, I announced that you would never catch me in any kind of Mommy and Me bullshit, or one of these New Moms support groups at the Pump Station. Now, I’m desperate to fit one into my schedule. If you have been a mother for even one day longer than I have, you know things I don’t and you have things to teach me. Whereas I used to assume I would never fit in with women who would populate these classes, that I would never be one of the stroller lugging mom masses who give a shit about the tensile strength of swaddle cloths or the most effective diaper cream, now I just want some more mom friends. These days, it’s not unusual for me to practically molest moms I see on the street, at restaurants, anywhere, peppering them with questions: Do you like that baby carrier? Does it hurt your back? How long did you breast feed? How long does your baby sleep? When did she start sleeping through the night? What exactly is a Sleep Sheep? Did your baby ever get a rash on her cheeks? What pediatrician do you go to?
I start feverishly taking notes about whatever sleep schedule DVD or book she says was the magical sleep maker. I buy it all.
When I get a mom in my clutches that seems to have her shit together, I don’t stop at the easy questions, I pry her for information about vaccines and anything else she seems open enough to reveal.
Just like the new kid in school who is trying to fit in, I’m starting to inch up to the mom crowd, to figure out what they wear and how they act and think. The clerk at the Pump Station told me that the Monday afternoon support group is empty, because all the moms go the Mommy and Me movie over at the Grove that day. Get there early on Tuesdays, she added, because it’s standing room only. And I realize, the moms travel in a flock, and maybe I’d be better off getting in formation than flying solo.
If I go where they go, maybe I can learn what they know. Part of me is still wary of joining, because I want to do everything my own way, but I’m starting to think my own way sucks and that there is an inherent wisdom to the flock. Besides, in every social situation I’ve ever been in, I always find the one other girl who feels like a complete outsider and we become friends, even if that bond is at least in part based on judging everyone else who seems happier and better adjusted.
What I’m saying is this: yes, I am sitting here in public (very public, at the Public Library, in fact, where a girl can look homeless and stink a little without bothering any of the registered sex offenders) wearing what is really kind of a nightgown with ankle socks and sneakers. This is my life now. I don’t even care. I’d rather not run into any ex-boyfriends, but essentially I don’t care.
I said a lot of things before.
I said I would never use a picture of my child as my profile photo anywhere, because I would rather lose my identity in more subtle ways. While I’ve resisted, my cell phone wallpaper photo is just Buster, no me, no dad, just the boy. That is a gateway baby photo, which can only lead to more serious use of the baby’s picture to stand in for my own. It’s happening.
Only stone cold bores and anti-intellectual twats spoke for their infants, imbuing them with all kinds of adult thoughts and feelings they could never, ever possess, the way a spinster announces that Mr. Fluffy loves “Friday Night Lights” but doesn’t care for the sound of the mailman’s voice. That would never be me, I said.
That was before my soul took a dip in maternal hormones and dried off only to find it appropriate to say, “Buster has a crush on you” or “Buster is flirting with you” or “Buster loves Jimmy Page guitar solos” or “Buster just can’t wait to see grandpa” or “Buster feels so dapper in his cardigan” or “Buster just loves his bath.” Like I know what the fuck that guy thinks or feels.
The fact is: I don’t show shit. I literally don’t know shit about shit.
I don’t know why poop is green or if it matters, I don’t know what goes on in my child’s mind, if anything, or how best to plan his nap and feeding schedule so he sleeps through the night, or when to stop swaddling him or what causes a baby rash or if I should really stop eating milk or nuts or soy or whether he really needs all of his vaccines on one day or if he’s fussier than other babies or cries more or sleeps less or if, in fact, he is totally average. Do I hold him too much or not enough? I just don’t know.
It’s like I met a guy, fell in love at first sight, flew to Vegas to get married that day, and woke up a couple of months later to find I was madly in love with a stranger.
I know I love the child, because when I listen to John Denver songs and look down at him I cry right onto his onesie with a feeling of euphoria I can only call narcotic (later I cry because my stomach still hurts from the C-section and I just want to put him down, but he needs to be rocked all the livelong day).
Yeah, I’m certain I love him, I just don’t know him, or if there is much to know. I’m not totally sure how to make him happy yet, or how best to care for him, so until I get that down, which may be never, all of my pronouncements are out the window.
When he smiles up at me in the morning, squirming on his changing table, it’s like a shot of morphine right to my heart. I spend the rest of the day chasing the dragon.
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The Rabbi, My Mother and the Bag of Crap
October 23rd, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Buster is one month old today.
And I think I am finally ready to tell the story about the rabbi, my estranged mother and a bag of shit, and how this only partially holy trinity converged at my Koreatown home one Tuesday afternoon.
When Buster was eight days old, we invited a rabbi over to circumcise the kid. My husband – not a Jew – was okay with the snip snip but thought it was creepy to turn the whole situation into a party. Fair enough. So it was going to be just the two of us, until he started suggesting it might be nice to have my mom there, my mom who I haven’t talked to in about a year.
Just before the baby was born, a package arrived addressed to the unborn child from “Grandma Strasser.” Inside were a hand-knit orange stuffed dinosaur, a tiny sweater with pockets and a hood, and a powder blue blanket. Though she hadn’t called me since my brother told her I was pregnant, it looked as though she had been knitting ever since.
There was a note to the baby that simply said, “Grandma can’t wait to meet you.”
I cried my fucking eyes out with that orange dinosaur in my hand because I was hormonal, and it was a week before my baby was due, and my mother was reaching out in her own stilted way and while it would be nice if she could say “sorry” or “I miss you,” I stood on my stoop fully aware that some people speak with yarn.
That woman let me down in such a profound way that just the sound of her clearing her throat too loudly makes me want to toss her purse out of a moving car. Try as I may, I haven’t been able to process the backlog of anger at her even after all these years, which has made me an inpatient, puerile, irrational daughter. Yes, the woman put me on many a Greyhound bus when I was in elementary school, but I don’t know how to stop making her pay, so I just stop talking to her.
It’s kind of a mom sabbatical. I take one every few years or so.
Somehow, between the extinct knit creature’s baleful look and the post C-section narcotics, my husband convinced me that we should invite my mom to the bris.
Also, when we went to the rabbi’s website, there was a check list of things we needed for the procedure, gauze pads, kosher wine, ointment and other items the acquisition of which would have been impossible as I could still barely get up and down and my husband couldn’t leave me alone with the baby. I was a mommy and I needed my mommy. I really needed my mommy.
My husband called her for me, and as he predicted, she accepted the invite on very short notice, offered to pick up everything we needed plus a platter of bagels and lox. I could hear her voice over the phone, and the tone conjured something like enthusiasm, maybe even chirpiness. It heartened me that my chronically depressed mom would not only sound psyched, but also drive five hours from Vegas to see her new grandson at the drop of a yarmulke, salve in hand.
So, with the rabbi and my mother heading our way for the afternoon ceremony, my bowels decide, after having been removed and put back into place during surgery, to finally work after several days.
The resulting poop clogs the decrepit toilet in our old house.
At this point, I can’t bend, lift or twist. So, I sit there on the potty with my head in my hands just trying to think my way out of this mess. The rabbi and my mother are arriving in half an hour, my one-week old son is stirring in the next room with his dad, and I am both hovering over – and up – Shit’s Creek.
I am not now nor have I ever been one of those women who impress guys by being really open and carefree about their gas and bodily functions. Even writing this makes me vaguely uncomfortable. I wish I was that fart-in-your-face girl sometimes (I honestly hate even typing the word F-A-R-T), but there came a point in my 20s when I realized two things: I don’t dance and never will, and I don’t enjoy talking about gas or bowel movements, and never will. When I embraced being fundamentally inhibited, it changed my life. I am not the girl pretending to think gas is funny or grimacing my way through the Conga line at a wedding. I’m the one that insists she doesn’t poop, but instead excretes waste through her skin, like a frog. I’m the one finishing off your dinner roll and wine while YOU dance at the wedding, because YOU enjoy it. In summary, while I don’t relish being a pooper, being a “party pooper” suits me just fine. While I have few, if any, emotional boundaries, I make up for it by being private, almost proper, about the physical realm.
Never have I indicated in any way to husband, up until this moment, that anything noxious ever comes out of my ass, but now I’m fucked.
“Baby,” I yell, sheepishly, “I have a problem.” That’s when my husband rushes to the bathroom door. I start sobbing because I’m freaked out and exhausted and I don’t want this magical Jewish ritual to be marred by the smell of feces wafting through the house, my feces, and I certainly don’t want my husband seeing, smelling or experiencing my waste in any way, but I’m out of options. I scrub my hands like I can cleanse myself of this whole situation.
He hands me the baby, and runs to the garage for some sort of drain “snake.” I try to place my thoughts elsewhere, so that I can easily delete this memory in the future. I bounce the boy and look out the window at Koreatown.
There is some running back and forth from the garage to the front door, to the bathroom in back. I hear him call the plumber, who can’t make it until tomorrow. He calls the hardware store to see if they have a larger snake; they do not. I bounce the boy and watch the clock. Fifteen minutes to go.
It is at this moment that I glance outside the window again and see my husband running gingerly along the side of the house holding a bag of shit.
It takes my mind a moment to register the image (again, drugs, lack of sleep, major surgery, sudden life-changing transition to motherhood, heavy emotional family issues about to be addressed, impending removal of my baby’s foreskin).
There it is. My husband walk-running around the side of the house carrying – as one might a goldfish won from a county fair – a bag of toilet water and the offending, drain-clogging crap that he had somehow liberated from the bowel.
Nothing says your life has crossed over like seeing your husband carry a bag of your shit.
If one could die of cringing, I would have.
This is all my fault, I tell myself, for not better orchestrating my life, for having a breech baby and a C-section, for moving to this old house just weeks before the baby’s birth because I couldn’t make up my mind any sooner, for all the chaos of unpacked boxes and curtains not hung. I want everything to be slender and clean and tucked away and predictable, but I can’t go back and I smell Buster’s fuzzy head just to get a hit of the good stuff.
This, too, shall pass, I tell myself, just as that poop did through my colon.
Until now, I didn’t even discuss going number one with my husband and now I’m anxiously running to the front door to find out how it went when he hand-delivered a bag of number two to the trash can out front.
“No big deal,” he says, trying to pass it off. “All fixed.”
A tacit agreement that this didn’t happen is made.
Before the rabbi arrives, a bearded man right out of Central Casting, my mom shows up. She has been driving for hours, so her lime green linen shirt is a bit rumpled, but I can tell she has dressed up. She is carrying a plastic platter of bagels, cream cheese and lox for fifteen, as well as a bag with doubles and triples of all the items on the rabbi’s list. When she opens the door, I hug her and point to the baby, sleeping in his bouncy seat perched on the sofa. She strains to keep a neutral expression on her face, but tears are landing on her shirt. She doesn’t make a move to wipe them away, because her face is still trying to say, “This is no big deal.” I hand her the baby and she cries right onto his blankie, which she must have recognized from her months of knitting it.
“He’s beautiful,” she says. And she manages to sound a way she never has before. Maternal.
And just like that, we make small talk about Buster, his dimples, will his eye color change, did he know what terrible thing was about to happen to his pee-pee. We have a nosh. Like the unspoken agreement never to discuss the contents of the bag, my mother and I silently conspire to act as though the past year, and many of the years before that, have not been crap.
The rabbi arrives, and dips a cloth into some wine while gathering the four of us to talk about the “covenant” and the idea that a circumcision happens on the baby’s eighth day, because there is no eighth day of the week and so the concept is to transcend the earthly plane – or something like that. I don’t know. Anything a guy with a long beard who has done 15,000 snips has to say seems deep. And we give the child a Hebrew name – David – because my stepfather’s last name was Davidson and I know this will make my mom happy. When my stepfather was around, I could deal with my mother. He was a buffer, like the baby will be.
The rabbi asks my mom to hold the baby and let him suck on the wine-soaked corner of a cloth. This is anesthesia, old school style. The baby is sucking on that Manischewitz rag like maybe his gentile half is taking over, which gives us an easy laugh.
After looking around, the rabbi sets up shop on my desk, because that’s where the sunlight filters in and he wants a clear view. My husband holds the cloth in the baby’s mouth as the rabbi does his thing. Thirty seconds later, with barely a peep from the boy, it’s all over.
The rabbi gives us instructions on how and when to apply the ointment and tells us to bury the foreskin in the dirt to show God we are earthy. It feels like I’ve been sucking on a wine cloth of my own, but I’m just tipsy with a double shot of relief and gratitude; my husband not only fixed the toilet, but he at least duct-taped over the mom problem, which can never be truly repaired but can at least be patched and re-patched. Now, she isn’t just my mother, but my son’s grandmother, and I would be an asshole to rob my son of his grandma because I can’t forgive her.
The rabbi was a man gifted with babies.
He told us to stay calm, always calm, so your baby will do the same. This isn’t always easy for me, because I love that little fucker so much that the idea of making a mistake, of not knowing what he needs or failing him, the worry that something may be broken in his body or mind that I can’t fix, the idea that I don’t have the patience or sweetness or wisdom to deserve him, well, that is the big bag of shit my soul carries around.
The rabbi leaves. My mom heads back to Vegas. Later that night, I send her a photo my husband took of her holding Buster, tears dotting her green shirt, mouth slightly turned down at the corners, staring down at her first grandchild. She emails back, “Please keep the pictures coming, love Grandma.” And we bury the foreskin in the front yard.
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My Dad Writes a Letter to the Editor
October 17th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
My dad holds Nathaniel before exploiting him.
* A Note: People who write letters to the editor to their small town newspapers are generally crazy old coots. That may be true of my dad, but he makes some solid points nonetheless. As those who have heard me talk about my dad ad nauseam on the radio already know, he was an auto mechanic for 35 years (alternators, generators and starters) and now tutors kids part-time. He probably reads a couple books a week, as well as renting out his services to whack the weeds from neighboring lawns for $50. He is my idol. And possibly a crazy, old coot. Here is a letter he wrote to the venerable Record-Bee:
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Nathaniel James
September 29th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
With my son. Just wanted to type that.
He was known as Frank Breech, but after a C-Section and a few days of toiling over his official name, Frank “Buster” Breech became Nathaniel James.
He was born 7.7 pounds, and when he came out, he looked purple like a bunch of grapes held up at a Sunday farmer’s market. I don’t know who it was – a doctor, a nurse, the anesthesiologist, someone announced, “He’s a chunky monkey” and I’ve never been more excited to hear the first fat joke about my son. I knew no one would be joking if he didn’t have all of his fingers and toes and appear to be in good working order. You don’t start rhyming and referencing Ben n’ Jerry’s flavors when things are going awry. Even someone with a spinal block, restraints and a nasty case of Hebrew panic knows this on some visceral level. Especially, maybe.
To say I’ve never been more relieved is such an understatement it’s kind of a shame; I should probably not be allowed to write until I can actually pass a reasonable stool. Maybe normal movement of one’s colon is critical to self-expression not involving lame cliches and semi-obvious declarations. Please, humor me until the Colace and prune juice kick in.
So, after he was pronounced a chunky monkey, and the doctor said, “He was definitely breech … and definitely a boy …” (guess he presented with a big rump and typically swollen baby balls) I started bawling right there on the table, tears pooling around my oxygen mask, trying not to choke on snot and shock and the weird mucus that collects when you’re on your back and pregnant. Until the second they brought him over to me and let me kiss his goopy, red face, I was convinced that setting up a crib, and buying a rug for his nursery and occasionally imagining he would be okay would all have cursed him, and that I would never, ever be lucky enough to get a real live healthy baby.
No matter how many tests told me otherwise and how often I saw his heartbeat, even moments before they removed him and I could hear his heart thudding steady and strong on the fetal heart monitor, I was sure this was all a big mistake and that something would be wrong and everyone had missed it.
All that being said - and I promise to say more once I’m back in business – this C-Section was gnarly. I know some people find them easy, I am not one of those people.
The recovery was and is more difficult than I imagined, the surgery was terrifying and maybe this is just me, but I think I even caught a 24-hour bout of PTSD.
And I’m glad no one really gave me the nuts and bolts of the C, because it would have freaked my shit out. So I feel funny saying too much if anyone has one of these on the horizon, because you will be fine. Again, more to come, but I’m just so grateful to those of you who have followed this blog and sent your well wishes that I wanted to let you know that baby, mom and dad are doing great. Dad has changed every diaper and burped every burp because though I’m up to breast feeding the little guy, I can’t do much else with breaking doctor’s orders to avoid BLT: bending, lifting and twisting.
I’m yammering.
Sometimes it’s kind of nice to find yourself living a cliche, deliriously happy and deliriously tired mom. That’s me. Mom. I’m someone’s mom. He is my son.
For someone who wasn’t baby crazy, who didn’t really get babies at all, I do all the disgusting things like smell his head and take pictures of him incessantly and become convinced that I’m not biased at all, but that my baby actually is extra adorable with fantastic hair.
It’s my first day out of the hospital and like I said, I’m feeling pretty wrecked. Haven’t even had a chance to check out my new slice but I have run my fingers over it and I will tell you, they need a little extra room to remove the frank breech types. Seems about five inches or so. I’m okay with it, I just don’t want to look. And I still appear almost as pregnant as when I went in there. And my legs are swollen. On and on. Hard to wrap up this post which as far as prose goes is kind of a disaster. Time for a feeding, and yes, time for the boy to exploit me, as I have been doing him for the last six months.
Again, thanks for all of your kind words and well wishes and more than that, all of your very specific advice and recollections from everything to car seats to nipple pads to latching to morning sickness.
I read every single thing you wrote, and I often took your counsel and many times I dragged my husband over to read what you posted, because I was touched or consoled, because your experience was just like mine, and that made me feel less lonely. And I know that the sensations I’m having now, the baby “high” and the rubbing his velvety arms and the crying cause I can’t poop or sleep and the sad sack thoughts when I catch my bloated reflection and the surreal smacking myself over being his mom, and him not being in my stomach anymore, but instead sitting there in his bouncy seat, I know this has all been said and done and felt. Maybe by you. Instead of that taking away from its value, today, somehow it seems to add to it. Instead of scoffing at the human experience, I’m just giving in.
There aren’t that many main courses on the menu in this life, when it comes to the big experiences.
So, despite wanting to be terminally unique, at some point you order the chicken or the steak. Maybe the surf and turf. Because there are only so many dinners available at the cosmic table. The real comfort, and the big bombshell, isn’t how I felt too good to have what the rest of you were having, but not good enough. And here I am with my baby, like a billion and a half mothers before me, and we all want to hear that our children are chunky monkeys, and that we are not, and that’s where I find magic where I least expected it, right in the hackiness. There aren’t many offerings for dessert, either, and that’s the sweetest part, that we’re all telling the same stories and scooping our cold spoon into one infinite pint.
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Sitting Stretch Mark Shiva
September 21st, 2009 Teresa Strasser
It's Just a Stretch Mark, You Big Dummy.
I have a stretch mark.
This is not a big deal. Or rather, I wish I were a person for whom this was not a big deal, but after spending two hours online last night in the wee hours looking at pictures of stretch marks and doing research, I realize I do not subscribe to the Warrior Woman thing about “my trophy” and “all worth it” and “this was my baby’s home for nine months.” Fuck that.
Did I mention I just have the one? Still, it’s red and loud like a blinking, broken arrow, an arrow pointing right to the place where my vanity lives, a tenant I expected to be evicted and replaced by nurturing, maternal “don’t care how I look because I’m so in love with motherhood” lady. Whether depth and vanity can share a pad without finishing off each other’s peanut butter and taking poor phone messages, I have no idea.
I just know I took a long look at the mark in the mirror in the middle of the night and I had a choking, irrational cry.
Moreover, most women get a rush of stretch marks right about now, just before birth, and I can see several more appearing on the left side of my stomach, crouching, laying in wait to ambush my collagen and confidence.
Life just feels like what happens while I wait for more stretch marks. My goddamn dermis is like a ticking time bomb.
If you search long enough, you can find anything online, like sites that encourage moms to post pictures of their bellies, with or without stretch marks, and tell their stories. It was all very disturbing, the women who looked like they had been clawed across the abdomen by a giant, angry bear and their own genetics. I want to find them valiant, but just see my own mother, practically disfigured by groups of chunky, textured, silvery marks. It never seemed to bother her much, which made it bother me more, and maybe the entire process of looking in the mirror and seeing my mother triggers a deep Freudian crisis.
There were the photos, too, of the women who escaped unscathed, not a mark on their bellies. Well, goooooood for you, said my mind in the quiet calm of the Koreatown night, goooood for you. Like Christian Bale yelling at his DP, gooooood for youuuuuuuuuuuu snidely said my mind.
I worry about big things, too.
I worry all the time about the baby being born deaf or blind or not making it at all. I worry that I have tempted fate with my Diaper Champ and hand-me-down crib and drawers full of onesies, as if to say to the universe that I take it for granted I will get a healthy baby. A few times a day, I flash on an image of myself sitting alone in the nursery I was scared to furnish, hugging the orange dinosaur my mom knitted, crying in the corner because of some unspeakable tragedy rendering all of this baby stuff useless. The whole thing is extra poignant, rows of baby socks with no tiny feet to put in them. I know, it’s twisted, but don’t accuse me of only worrying about the stupid shit.
Don’t worry. As a Jew, I have enough room in my heart for all levels of anxiety. The shelves are stocked with sizes from XS to XXL.
When the doctor first told me the baby was “frank breech,” meaning head up and rump down, I was bummed about needing a scheduled C-section, disappointed about the controlled calm of appointment birthing. No water breaking at Starbucks, manic drive to the hospital, no ice chips and sweating and gruesome rite of passage labor story.
Now I think, why the fuck did labor seem like such a mystical adventure?
I just want this kid out so I can sleep on my back without suffocating, roll over in bed without sounding like Fred Sanford, not be congested anymore, smoke a couple cigarettes on a Friday night or when I’m writing and need to feel like Norman Mailer. I want to drink a freezing cold martini, take a Xanax, fit into my shoes, schedule toxic beauty treatments. Most of all, I want to be done wondering if the kid is alright, if he’ll survive his journey out of my body, if I did a good enough job carrying him for these past nine months, if he got all his Omega fatty acids and protein and Folic and fat and brain stimulation. Like probably everyone who is 39 weeks pregnant for the first time, I’m ready for this to be over. I just want to hold my baby.
Maybe for now, for right now, as I await either a C-section in a few days – or a vaginal birth if Buster suddenly decides to right himself – it’s easier to focus on one single stretch mark. There’s only so far it can rip you apart.
This facile psychological interpretation not only buys me a one-way ticket to obvious-ville, it makes me look so much better than a woman who hyperventilates over a stretch mark or two.
Or maybe a stretch mark freak out is simply that. The fact is these suckers are truly irreversible, and I just need a second to process.
They can send a man to the moon, transplant a human face, smash an atom with a linear accelerator, air-condition a condo in Phoenix, make sure you always know exactly where you are in space with a $200 GPS the size of a wallet. Yet they can’t really do much about the scars of motherhood.
Every transition involves a loss, even if you are blessed enough to find yourself pregnant and on the eve of motherhood and the luckiest darn 39 year-old alive, there is still something left behind, and even if that something is just a silly old image of yourself in a bikini looking like Phoebe Cates in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (which you never, ever did) one thing gives way to another and it can’t hurt to stop and waive goodbye.
In my own way, I have to sit shiva, grieve a bit for what was and allow myself to be fully and fairly terrified and inspired by what’s coming. That or just get some self-tanner. Both are miracles.
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My Baby is All Ass-Backward
September 16th, 2009 Teresa StrasserWho is this dude, Frank Breech?
Well, it looks like my baby is what they call frank breech. Like three to four percent of all babies, he is bottom down, head up. A C-section is already on the books for eight days from today.
However, experts say one way to coax the baby’s head down so he can safely dive out vaginally is to place headphones inside mom’s pants toward her pubic bone and play music for ten minutes, 6-8 times a day. That’s right, the right song played near my girl parts can save me a major surgery and an unsightly scar.
This begs the obvious question, what music would lure a baby’s head down so he can be born the old-fashioned way?
Here are some suggestions I’ve gotten via Twitter, which I think are pretty genius:
“Into the Great Wide Open” by Tom Petty
“Down in the Hole” by the Rolling Stones
“Jump Around” by House of Pain
“Follow You Down” by The Gin Blossoms
“Hold On, I’m Coming” by Sam and Dave
“Head On” by the Pixies
“Heading Out to the Highway” by Judas Priest
“Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
“Upside Down” by Diana Ross
“We Gotta Get Out of this Place” by the Animals
“Turn! Turn! Turn!” by The Byrds
In short, my V needs a DJ ‘cause the baby needs to spin. Whaddya got?
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Are Breast Feeding Classes For Boobs?
September 7th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
No worse than drinking formula.
Here’s what you need to know about exclusively breast fed babies: they can levitate.
That’s what I learned last night during a three-hour breast-feeding class.
They also have x-ray vision, are immune to disease, are more likely to win Nobel Prizes, recycle, live meaningful lives, understand James Joyce, love fully, donate to NPR pledge drives, stop to help distressed motorists, appreciate Rachmaninoff, have high credit scores and get appointed to important government posts. Oh, and breastfed babies live forever. The science on that isn’t totally in yet, but better safe than sorry.
Moreover, if you breast feed, the baby weight will melt off of you. You will evade reproductive cancers. The release of feel-good hormone oxytocin when your baby is “at your breast” will saturate your system with “delicious” feelings of attachment and contentment such as you have never experienced before. Mothers who miss out on this mommy morphine are likely to leave their babies in the middle of the road to be pecked at by turkey vultures.
Okay, that’s not totally true. Some mothers who skip this crucial biological bonding experience will simply leave their child at a fire station with $5, a bottle of formula and half a pack of Benson & Hedges Menthol Ultra Lights in a box.
A room full of us pregnant women, shifting around in uncomfortable plastic chairs and gnawing on free cookies with our husbands, were also given a stern warning: Never ever let the baby out of your sight at the hospital once it is born.
Some sleepy, overworked, well-meaning but ultimately evil nurse is going to hear it cry and give it … well, what might as well be a cocktail of lead paint, asbestos juice and Southern Comfort: FORMULA. That’s right, your precious baby’s ability to be exclusively fed at your breast, the way god and Mother Nature intended, will be forever compromised if you don’t step up with some major vagina power and tell the nurses they are NOT taking your baby out of your sight for one single second at the hospital. Once that baby gets away from you and into the hospital nursery, it’s a free for all and you can kiss your dreams of attending your child’s inauguration goodbye. Once it gets a taste of that plastic nipple and guzzles away at that easy access plastic bottle filled with borderline lethal formula, forget that child loving you, crafting you handmade cards or even sitting in your lap. If you didn’t see the movie “Nell,” you are about to live it with your jacked up, detached, sickly child.
We also learned some of the subtle differences between bottle and breast fed babies.
For one thing, babies who are bottle fed stink. They smell foul. As for breastfed tykes, their shit literally doesn’t stink, though it may be an alarming shade of black for a few days before it goes Mustard yellow.
That’s what I learned in my breast-feeding class.
On the other hand, outside of the minty green and pastel pink confines of the breast-feeding store, tucked away in an urban strip mall in East Los Angeles, in the real mom world, some of my girlfriends just didn’t take to breastfeeding. Their kids seem fine. From my unscientific sampling of moms I know who chose to bottle feed, I see no asthma, no allergies and no bonding problems with the babies. The moms lost the baby weight. I’m not sure if the kids are a ticking time bomb or if the moms are just enjoying a few years until the uterine cancer kicks in, but it seems unlikely.
So, how do you get a straight answer when everyone seems to have a horse in the breast-feeding race? Both sides seem to have massive agendas and neither appears all that interested in actual data, which makes it hard for us pregnant girls to truly understand our options. Women who chose not to breast feed need to believe they did the right thing; breast feeding advocates are unswervingly formula-intolerant.
Last night, our statuesque, red-haired, 50-something lactation consultant and teacher, impressed me with her massive knowledge of boobies and extreme comfort in discussing latching and leaking. However, when she told us about her own kids and mentioned how healthy the now-grown offspring are, she also added that one of them has a little bit of asthma, only when he runs. Wait a second, you mean this panacea doesn’t work for someone who was breastfed for two years?
“The doctors told us it would have been way, way worse if I hadn’t breast fed,” she explained.
Really?
Now that is some backward, bias data analysis if I’ve ever heard it. Look, the kid has respiratory problems and his mom is a lactation lady who did nothing but breastfeed him the “right” way for two years straight. That means one of her three children has asthma. How can these facts fit into the hypothesis that breast milk staves off breathing problems? Get our your logic shoehorn and let’s see what we can do.
I understand there was a time when women were essentially forced to bottle feed and shamed out of caring for their babies in a way that seems both natural and righteous.
There was a time when the hospital just told you what to do, yanked your baby away from you after birth and generally dismissed what we now understand to be the importance of skin-to-skin contact, etc. From where I sit, however, it seems the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction, so that women for whom breastfeeding just doesn’t make sense or feel right are vilified as selfish, lazy, impatient baby haters. Somewhere between Little Ricky and Ricky Lake there is a more easy-going place.
Look, I’m going to give it a try, but if it doesn’t work out, or if perhaps I’m not the two-years of breast feeding kind of girl, I hope the milk of human kindness is also available in formula.
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Today’s “Almost Live News” With Adam Carolla
September 2nd, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Not retaining information so well; retaining water very well.
On Today’s “Almost Live News Podcast,” Adam discusses DJ AM, the latest Duggars offspring, the fires, and shares some sentimental musings about the birth of his twins three years ago. And by musings, I mean rantings.
Listen here.
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Check Out a Jeweler Hacking Off My Wedding Ring
August 27th, 2009 Teresa StrasserThe Mr. and I head down to the mall to get my ring removed after my hands swelled to corpse-like proportions.
Perhaps my wussy attitude toward ring removal does not bode well for childbirth. I always thought I had a high pain tolerance, but this is not a rugged display.
Preggisode Week 35: Lordy, These Rings from Teresa Strasser on Vimeo.
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On Today’s Adam Carolla Show …
August 26th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Umm. To the person who posted how fat I look in this dress: Cut me some slack. And a slice of cake.
On today’s Adam Carolla Show podcast:
Why I’m headed for a jeweler with a hacksaw.
Why Huell Howser beats Propofol, but may also have serious side effects.
The XXX theme song from “This Ain’t Happy Days.”
Why Michael Vick’s stomach butterflies should be nervous.
Latest news on Buster’s actual name.
Please take a listen.
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Other Pregnant Ladies Kind of Ignore Me
August 18th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Getting all self-reflective and shit.
Hey other pregnant ladies, quit avoiding my gaze.
All I want to do is chat you up, and find out how many weeks pregnant you are and maybe talk some shop – you know, where you’re delivering, what you take for heartburn, what you think of cord blood banking and the new iPhone app that times contractions. I just want to be friends, pregnant strangers.
I’ve never done this baby thing before, and I’m always hoping we’re going to see each other and do a secret handshake, and have a moment.
However, it seems you gestational types aren’t that into me. For a while, I tried to smile at you when I saw you in line at the movies, or feeding your meter, or buying groceries. I tried to look welcoming, but you looked right past me, and off I went with my tail between my crampy legs.
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Radical Podcast Experiment with Adam Carolla
August 7th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Producer "The Weez" photoshops out my sweat stains. And thus there is room for him in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now posted … Adam Carolla’s first “Almost Live” podcast.
We discuss today’s most important judges: Sotomayor and Abdul. We also cover the Gilligan’s Island porn, how Springsteen lyrics could be used to influence Adam’s wife, what Jay Mohr has to say via Twitter and the best way to handle being a Florida cop busting a house filled with exotic animals and meth.
Also, both “The Weez” and Adam reminisce about growing up with Molly Ringwald and her family as we remember the great John Hughes.
Listen here, and if you like, comment here.
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The Nine Worst Moms in History
July 31st, 2009 Teresa Strasser
"Motherhood sucks. I gotta get out of here."
I wake up every night with esophagus-searing heartburn and the sensation that I’m suffocating. I cry, smearing the mascara I was too lazy to remove on my pregnancy pillow. My husband tells me it will be okay, which he can now do without even waking up.
I take a bath, eat a peach, listen to Fresh Air podcasts, read a chapter of my Neil Diamond book, and try to fall back asleep, all the while moaning and grunting like Ed Asner at Jazzercise. None of this is a big deal in the grand scheme of pregnancy issues, but would it be okay if I just sat back and crapped on other people for a while to make myself feel better?
Look, I am not a mom yet. I am nervous Buster isn’t going to get the best mom in the world, because I’ve never been baby crazy or even changed a diaper. This list makes me feel better, because in many ways, these ladies lowered the mom bar. Let me know if I missed anyone.
The Nine Worst Moms in History
1. Joanna Kramer: This mother, played by Meryl Streep in the 1979 film, “Kramer vs. Kramer,” represented all that was wrong with ‘70s moms. Meryl – icy, selfish and put-upon – bails on her family, only to return a year and a half later to take back her son and screw up the life he’s finally put together with his pops, played by Dustin Hoffman. When she’s done scarring her kid and taking her “me” time, possibly doing some self-actualized macramé, she waltzes in and sparks a big, ugly custody battle. She wins little Billy back, but in the end, decides to ditch the kid for a second time. The whole ordeal is so emotionally grueling for Billy, he gets an Oscar nod, and remains the youngest actor to ever be nominated.
There were so many Meryl moms when I was growing up in San Francisco; they got tricked into motherhood by the ‘60s and didn’t dig it. They spent their food money on babysitters just to get away from the kids who were sucking the lives out of them.
Joanna Kramer was the quintessential Bad ‘70s Mom, with her tailored trench coat, chunky leather boots, perfectly fitted blouses, neck scarves and patrician cheekbones, she made ditching your child so glamorous, it made you wonder why any sap would stick around.
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Babymoon in Vegas: Bet on a Crisis
July 21st, 2009 Teresa Strasser
On the way to Vegas, things start to go wrong, as they so often do, at the Mad Greek.
Within a couple of hours, I will be trying to locate the nearest hospital, but now I’m just waiting for the beefy, sunburned guy in front of me to stop yelling at the clerk about his $3, and how it was her mistake, and how he’s going to file a claim with the state. Behind me, a man eats sullenly at a booth with his well-behaved toddler, who silently chews one fry after another.
The place smells of coconut sunscreen, with base notes of diesel and feta.
Soon, I will make my husband promise I won’t end up at Summerlin Hospital, 20 minutes or so from the Strip. My mom – whom I haven’t talked to in a year – lives in Vegas, so I know it’s nearby. I have no idea if what is happening to me is serious, all I know is that I don’t want to end up at Summerlin, because you go there to die, or at least my stepfather did. When he passed (as Hemingway would say “gradually and then suddenly”), his death certificate described him as “white” and his cause of death as leukemia.
Only he was black. And died of congenital heart failure.
Probably an honest mistake, but doesn’t point to great attention to detail. That place reminds me of sloppiness and slipping away, and while I have a long history of being lukewarm on my own existence, the pull to keep this baby safe is tethering me to this world like nothing else has.
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Episiotomy: A Cut Above (the anus)
July 16th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Lyricist of my vaginal nightmares.
Now that I’m seven months pregnant, I have finally gotten around to taking a break from worrying about what kind of mother I’m going to be in order to get to the urgent business of stone cold panicking about how this kid is getting out of me, and what damage he might do as he leaves. At my last doctor visit, we had the episiotomy talk, and now I can’t stop thinking about the potential slicing of my privates, or the uncontrolled tearing, or the aforementioned fecal freaking incontinence, which happens to some women after childbirth.
According to Rod Stewart, “the first cut is the deepest,” but I think it’s safe to say any cut that might lead to bowel leakage is the deepest, at least emotionally and spiritually.
First and second trimester concerns seem almost quaint in their solvability. Nauseas? Enjoy some ginger chews and pop some B-12. Leg cramps? Stretch your calves before bed and eat a banana. Your baby’s head is too big to exit your vagina? Slice open the area between your anus and vulva, stitch it back up, and hope you don’t end up with the inability to control the seepage of gas and stools from your bowels due to a torn sphincter.
Perhaps I was intentionally fuzzy on the episiotomy thing. I wasn’t ready to know about my perineum. Call it squeamishness, or emotional immaturity, or just ignorance.
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New Pregnancy Meltdown Caught on Tape
July 14th, 2009 Teresa StrasserCan’t breathe at night. Normal pregnancy symptom, I’m told. Still, it feels so torturous I keep expecting John Yoo to write me a memo.
The good news is that this middle-of-the-night meltdown was captured by the Mr. If I’m going to exploit my baby, why not start now by exploiting my baby-related meltdowns?
If you are pregnant and panicking ’cause you can’t breathe, know you are not alone. If you are not, please enjoy a private but satisfying sense of superiority. That’s what I would do.
Oh, and this is NSFW. Sorry, I’m short of breath, but long on swears.
Enjoy another offering from Sonny and Overshare.
Preggisode: Week 25, Suffocation from Teresa Strasser on Vimeo.
Related Posts:
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New Podcast With Adam Carolla
July 10th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Horizontal stripes. Takes balls. And no mirror.
Just recorded a new podcast with Adam Carolla. Listen here.
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Cracking Up: Not the Laughing Kind, The Crazy Kind
July 8th, 2009 Teresa Strasser
Feeling blue. Too literal?
With one goal in mind, to buy a car seat online, I sat with my laptop and a toaster waffle at the kitchen table this morning.
An hour later, I’m sobbing in bed, yesterday’s mascara smeared across my once white, noodle-shaped pregnancy pillow. There is a small chance I am cracking up, because I am weeping like Sally Field in “Steel Magnolias” during the funeral scene, only no one has died. Nope, I just can’t figure out which car seat to buy today.
Disproportionate emotional response + crying in bed before noon = going mental.
I consider calling someone, but how can I explain that I’m losing my shit because I can’t figure out the difference between a Snap-n-Go and a SnugRide?
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Using the Term “Celeb” Very Loosely
July 7th, 2009 Teresa StrasserThank you for this very kind write up, KnockedUpCelebs.com:
“You may know Teresa Strasser from the TLC show, While You Were Out, or from theAdam Carolla radio show she does in the morning. I got a chance to talk to her the other day when she pointed me in the direction of her pregnancy blog, Exploiting My Baby. Teresa takes a look at the funny side of pregnancy all while airing her fears of becoming a parent. I laughed so much while reading it and wished that this blog was around when I was pregnant.”
If you wanna read the rest of my interview with KnockedUpCelebs, here it is.
Also, thank you Bellyitch.com for spotlighting this blog and for the kind words.
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